Tag Archives: PLN

He won the Costa Rican presidency yesterday with 78% of the vote. His opponent considered the runoff so hopeless that he conceded defeat and suspended his campaign a month ago. With nearly 1.3 million votes, he won more votes than any other Costa Rican presidential candidate in the country’s modern history.

But now that he’s been officially elected Costa Rica’s new president, what will Luis Guillermo Solís (pictured above) do in office?

The first thing he’ll have to do is temper high expectations that Costa Rica’s first third-party president in modern history will suddenly transform the country into a wealthier, corruption-free, social democratic paradise.

The son of a cobbler and the grandson of a laborer on a banana plantation, Solís vowed to reverse the income and social inequality that’s become a growing concern in what is arguably Central America’s most politically and economically successful country.

Solís, a historian who has never held elective office, won a surprise victory won the first round of the presidential election on February 2, edging out one-time frontrunner Johnny Araya, the candidate of the ruling Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN, National Liberation Party) and the longtime mayor of San José. Solís’s strong showing against Araya in the final presidential debate bolstered his candidacy, which had languished in fourth or fifth place in polls, even a week before the February vote.

It was a magnificent turnaround for a candidate who barely figured in the polls at the end of 2013.

Solís won 77.85% in Sunday’s runoff, while 22.15% voted for Araya, despite the suspension of Araya’s campaign on March 6. He said that he’ll start announcing key members of his cabinet next Monday, April 14.

Araya was attempting to win a third consecutive presidential term for the PLN. In the 2010 vote, Costa Ricans elected Laura Chinchilla as the country’s first female president. Despite initially high expectations, Chinchilla’s administration has been a disaster, marred by embarrassing corruption scandals within the PLN and charges of lackluster economic policy.

Costa Rican voters also had doubts about Araya’s leading challenger, the far more leftist José María Villalta, the candidate of the socialist Frente Amplio (Broad Front), who had been expected to advance to a runoff against Araya.

So it’s not a surprise that voters would turn to Solís, who offered a slightly more leftist vision for Costa Rica than Araya and the PLN, but not so socialist as Villalta and the Broad Front.

He’ll take office with an incredibly fragmented Asamblea Legislativa (Legislative Assembly) — his own party, the Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC, Citizen’s Action Party), holds just 13 seats in the 57-member chamber. That means he’ll have to form an alliance with the PLN, which holds 18 seats, or form ad-hoc coalitions with other lawmakers who range in ideology from Christian democratic to radical libertarian to chavista-style socialist.

It helps that Solís — and the PAC’s unofficial leader Ottón Solís (no relation to the president-elect) both started their political careers with the PLN. Ottón Solís, elected in February to the National Assembly as a deputy, will play an important role in forming and achieving the new administration’s agenda. For the past decade, opposition to the ruling PLN and to corruption has united the PAC, and it’s ideological diversity has been helpful in the 2014 campaign. Once in government, however, Luis Guillermo Solís may find it difficult to unite a party that contains both socialists and liberals — and to maintain a constructive role for Ottón Solís. Continue reading What will Solís do as Costa Rica’s new president?→

After the February 2 first-round votes in both El Salvador and Costa Rica, I wrote that even though the Costa Rican vote was tighter than the Salvadoran vote, it was easier to predict that Luis Guillermo Solís would defeat San José mayor Johnny Araya (despite just a 1.3% lead for Solís in the first round) in the April 6 runoff than Salvadoran vice president Salvador Sánchez Cerén (with a nearly 10% lead in the first round) would defeat San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano in the March 9 runoff.

Sure enough, while Sánchez Cerén is the favorite to win this weekend’s vote in El Salvador, the bigger news from Central America this week was Araya’s decision to suspend his campaign after a University of Costa Rica poll earlier this week showed the Solís held a staggering 44-point lead over Araya, winning 64.4% to just 20.9% for Araya (pictured above).

Though that poll included a sizable undecided vote (around 14.6%), it showed that Araya had lost ground in the past month — he won 29.6% of the first-round vote.

Facing the ignominy of leading Costa Rica’s most enduring party, the center-left Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN, National Liberation Party) through even more embarrassment, Araya suspended his campaign on Wednesday, with one month to go before the runoff.

Before yesterday’s presidential election, polls showed Luis Guillermo Solís, an academic and former diplomat, in fourth place in the race to become Costa Rica’s next president.

But on the strength of a surge in momentum at the end of the campaign, Solís (pictured above) not only elbowed his way into an expected April 6 runoff (only the second such runoff in the country’s history), but leapfrogged all the way to the top spot, edging out the frontrunner, San José mayor Johnny Araya, and the younger, more populist leftist José María Villalta. More recent surveys indicated a definite upswing in support as Solís capitalized on a strong performance in the final presidential debate, but even a late January poll showed Solís behind Araya, Villata and a conservative candidate, Otto Guevara.

Solís ultimately outpolled Araya by a little over 1% of the vote as undecided voters appear to have lined up solidly for the former diplomat — and he even defeated Araya in San José municipality, despite the fact that Araya has served as the city’s mayor since 1998.

Voters in three countries will go to the polls on Sunday in three very different kinds of contests on two continents:

In Thailand (population: 66.8 million), voters will elect all 500 members of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the Ratthasapha (National Assembly of Thailand, รัฐสภา), the lower house of Thailand’s parliament.

Prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra called snap elections following growing protests that began last November, ostensibly over an amnesty bill, but which have now torn the country back into the familiar pro-Yingluck ‘red shirt’ camps and the opposition ‘yellow shirt’ camps, the same pattern that’s gripped Thailand since the election of Yingluck’s brother Thaksin Shinawatra in 2001. Their ruling Pheu Thai Party (PTP, ‘For Thais’ Party, พรรคเพื่อไทย) seems set to win a landslide victory due to the boycott of the opposition Phak Prachathipat (Democrat Party, พรรคประชาธิปัตย์). So the election itself is unlikely to end the political protests and growing political violence.

The Democrats and their supporters are instead calling for an unelected governing council, and there’s a chance that, if the situation escalates, the Thai military could intervene (as so often in the past).

Read more about what the Thai protests have in common with Ukraine’s protests here.

In El Salvador (population: 6.3 million), three major candidates are vying for the Salvadoran presidency. Incumbent center-left president Mauricio Funes is ineligible to run for a second term.

Polls show a tight race between Salvadoran vice president Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the candidate of the leftist guerrilla front-turned-political party Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) and San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano, the candidate of the center-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance). Former conservative president Tony Saca is also running at the head of a coalition that includes a breakaway faction from ARENA.

If, as expected, no candidate wins over 50% of the vote, the top two candidates will advance to a March 9 runoff, which seems likely to pit Sánchez Cerén against Quijano in a race that features vastly different approaches to security, corruption, economic policy and regional alliances.

Sánchez Cerén is a former guerrilla leader during the 1979-92 Salvadoran civil war, and Quijano has been dogged by corruption charges and is linked to other ARENA figures under investigation for corruption. Funes, a former journalist, became the first FMLN candidate to win election in 2009.

In Costa Rica (population: 4.8 million), a general election will determine who will be the country’s next president and all 57 members of the Asamblea Legislativa (Legislative Assembly).

The two leading candidates, according to polls are longtime San José mayor Johnny Araya, the candidate of the ruling Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN, National Liberation Party) and José María Villalta, the only legislator of the previously minor socialist / social democratic Frente Amplio (Broad Front).

If none of the candidates wins 40% of the vote, the top two candidates will face off in an April 6 runoff.

Araya is seeking the third consecutive term for the PLN after the presidencies of Óscar Arias from 2006 to 2010 and the incumbent Laura Chinchilla, Costa Rica’s first female president. Chinchilla’s administration is unpopular — both for its inability to control corruption or to tackle the country’s growing debt.

Two other candidates could conceivably pull an upset, however: Otto Guevara, a conservative attorney, who is running his fourth consecutive presidential campaign, and Luis Guillermo Solís, a social democrat and former diplomat in the Arias administration.

The two Central American elections follow a general election in Honduras last November and precede a presidential election in Panamá on May 4. Earlier this week, Nicaragua also cleared the way for Sandinista president Daniel Ortega to run for reelection in 2016.

Read more about Suffragio‘s coverage of the recent Honduran general elections and the presidential inauguration last Monday of Juan Orlando Hernández here.

Not so long ago, the Costa Rican presidency was Johnny Araya’s to lose.

But as Costa Rica holds a general election on February 2 to pick a new president and all 57 members of its Asamblea Legislativa (Legislative Assembly), Araya is on the defensive and may find himself in a runoff against an upstart progressive candidate, José María Villalta (pictured above).

Araya (pictured above), the mayor of San José since 1998, the candidate of the relatively dominant center-left Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN, National Liberation Party) and the nephew of former president Luis Alberto Monge, led polls throughout 2013.

There were always reasons to believe that lead was soft, in light of the massive unpopularity of outgoing president Laura Chinchilla (pictured above), who late last year has a 12% approval rating, making Chinchilla, according to pollster Mitofsky, the least popular leader in Latin America. Elected in 2006 to great fanfare and high expectations as the country’s first female president, Chinchilla has struggled to contain Costa Rica’s exploding public debt, which grew from 30.7% of GDP in 2011 to 35.3% in 2012. Fifteen ministers have resigned during her administration following corruption and other scandals, and Chinchilla last May hit rock-bottom when she accepted jet rides from a Colombian businessman with suspected drug trafficking links. Furthermore, Araya’s two-decade record as mayor of Costa Rica’s capital, including ongoing investigations for corruption, provided his opponents with ample ammunition. Araya has also struggled at times to respond to critics about how he could lead a government that commands the trust of the electorate.

Despite those headwinds, Araya had hope to believe that he would win the PLN’s third consecutive presidential term, given the near-complete collapse of Costa Rica’s traditional center-right party of the past three decades, the Partido de Unidad Socialcristiana (PUSC, Social Christian Unity Party). Though it held the presidency three times between 1990 and 2006, its parliamentary caucus shrunk from 27 in 1998 to just six today, and its presidential candidates in 2006 and 2010 failed win more than 4% of the national vote. When former presidents Rafael Ángel Calderón Fournier and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez were convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges stemming from PUSC’s time in power, it massively discredited the party.

But the PUSC’s troubles have only worsened in the campaign leading up to Sunday’s vote. PUSC’s presidential candidate Rodolfo Hernández dropped out of the race, blasting his own party’s record on corruption along the way. That Hernández dropped out on October 3, changed his mind two days later, and left the race again on October 9 only made the PUSC’s chances worse. The PUSC hastily named Rodolfo Piza, the former head of Costa Rica’s social security system, who previously contested the PUSC primary for the presidential nomination in May 2013, as its nominee instead.

Support for three other candidates now threaten to deny Araya the 40% support he needs to win the election outright on Sunday, leading to a runoff between the top two candidates, likely on April 6. It would be just the second time in Costa Rican history that the presidential race requires a runoff (the first was in 2002).

The strongest challenger is the 36-year-old Villalta, whose popularity surged dramatically last autumn. He’s the candidate (and currently the sole parliamentary member) for the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), a relatively new social democratic party that has figured minutely in Costa Rican politics — until now.

A brash, confident leftist, Villalta has embraced a campaign heavy on human rights for an agenda to boost environmental regulations, enact same-sex marriage, and enact more progressive economic policies at odds with the broadly free-market policies that have dominated both PUSC and PLN administrations over the past three decades. But his youth and his rapid rise in Costa Rican politics have kept some voters from fully embracing his candidacy. Though he’s not a communist as his opponents have charged, words of solidarity with the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez have not helped convince voters that Villalta is moderate enough to govern Costa Rica effectively. He received some ridicule in the final presidential debate for suggesting a tax on sodas and other junk food, including chifrijo, a Costa Rican bar food that combines rice, beans, chicharrón (pork) and chimichurri.

The strongest candidate on the right is Otto Guevara (pictured above), who’s making his fourth consecutive presidential bid. Guevara, an attorney, founded the conservative Movimiento Libertario (ML, Libertarian Movement), in 1994 as an anti-corruption party championing free-market liberalism and greater individual rights. First elected as a legislator in 1998, Guevara has won increasing amounts of support in each election — 1.7% in 2002, 8.4% in 2006 and 20% in 2010. Guevara has taken a strong social conservative stand in the current campaign, especially against abortion and same-sex marriage. He’s benefitted from the collapse of the PUSC and, though he seems unlikely to make it into the second round, polls show that he could win the presidency in a runoff against either Araya or Villalta.

If Villalta had the momentum through the end of 2013, yet another center-left candidate seems to have captured that momentum as the campaign ends — Luis Guillermo Solís, an academic, diplomat and one-time adviser to former president Óscar Arias on the Esquipulas Peace Agreement that helped bring an end to the ideology-based civil wars that plagued much of Central America in the 1980s. Ariás, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts, has served twice as Costa Rica’s president, from 1986 to 1990 and again from 2006 to 2010, and he remains one of the region’s most respected statesmen. Solís (pictured above) left the PLN in 2005, however, and he’s running on a solidly center-left platform to improve the country’s health care and pension system and reduce corruption. Solís has sharply criticized both Chinchilla and Araya throughout the campaign and, as a more moderate center-left alternative to Araya, Solís may be winning voters who are having second thoughts about catapulting the more radical (and younger) Villalta to the presidency.

Solís represents the Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC, Citizen’s Action Party), another social democratic party founded in 2000 by Ottón Solís (no relation) that emerged as an anti-corruption alternative to the PLN that, like the Broad Front, is more skeptical of the PLN/PUSC adherence to neoliberal policies. The PAC, for example, opposed Costa Rica’s membership in the US-Central American Free Trade Agreement. Ottón Solís ran for president in the previous three elections, and he nearly defeated the seemingly unstoppable Arias in the 2006 election.

The final CID-Gallup poll released January 28 showed Araya holding onto a 35.6% lead, followed by Villalta with 21.0%, Guevara with 17.6%, Solís with 15.6% and Piza at just 6.5%, with other candidates winning just 3.6%. Those numbers represent a narrow drop for both Araya and Guevara, but it’s a bit of a sharper drop for Villalta, who was pollign in the mid-20s and high-20s earlier this month and in December. Villalta’s loss has been Solís’s gain. Continue reading Upstart leftist challenges Araya dominance in Costa Rican vote→

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Suffragio attempts to bring thoughtful analysis to the political, economic and other policy issues that are central to countries outside of the US -- to make world politics less foreign to the US audience. Suffragio focuses, in particular, on those countries and regions with upcoming or recent elections.